"This chiesa is famous for these statues of the eight virtues," Sciafani said to me as we passed through the nave, pointing at the four statues on each side. "Charity, Love, I forget the others." He was playing the happy native tour guide, as if the exchange outside had never happened.
"Justice," I said, pointing to the one holding scales.
"Bah! In this world, justice is hard to find."
A priest swept by us, his long black cassock dusting the floor as he walked. He glanced at us sourly and put a finger to pursed lips, more offended by our voices than our attire and armament. Someone began playing the organ, the energetic pumping echoing almost as loudly as the Gloria Patri itself. Exiting by a side door, we left the darkness behind and stepped out into the bright sun.
"You're not religious?" I asked Sciafani. He shrugged, which seemed to be the most common reply to any question asked in Sicily.
"Do you get on your knees and pray to Cristu?" he asked me, taking the steep stairs that led directly up from the plaza.
"Yeah, I go to church. Pretty often, when I'm home."
"I have no wish to beg on my knees, to whisper words after a priest to beg crumbs from heaven. You may as well beg a rich man for his land."
"You wouldn't pray for an end to the war?"
Sciafani broke his long stride and turned on me, his smoldering anger barely contained as he punched his finger at my chest. "Pray? To whom? It would take a giant to end this war, not the pale Jesus in the church paintings. He wasn't even much of a man, if you ask me. He had no wife, and gave up carpentry to go around giving speeches and begging for food. Sicilians revere his mother, Mary, more than him. Or our Sicilian saints, like Saint Lucia, who saved Catania from Mount Etna's eruption. Stopping lava-now that miracle I would get down on my knees and pray for. But where is this Jesus now that we need the great Son of God? Where is he since he chased some fish into a net and got himself crucified?"
He made a trembling fist and held it to my face, his eyes looking beyond mine, to some distant pain. I took his fist in both my hands and pulled it to my chest, recalling how I used to pray as a child.
"Who was it, Enrico? Your father? Your mother?"
His eyes widened in rage, then compressed as he worked to hold back tears.
"All of them, damn you!"
He pulled his hand from my grip violently, throwing me back hard against the stone wall. I stumbled a few steps, and then had to take the stairs two at a time to catch up with him.
"What do you mean, all of them? You spoke of your father as if he were still alive in Palermo. What's the truth?" He stopped again, the look of rage that had played across his features gone, replaced by weariness. He let out a breath and shook his head as he smiled, as you might at a small child who kept asking questions beyond his understanding. He put his hand on my shoulder gently.
"Why don't you pray to Christu, Billy? Ask him for the truth. Who better to tell you? Come, we are almost to the Duomo." That struck him as funny, I guess. He dropped his hand and climbed the steps, laughing as he went, the echoes rattling in the narrow passageway between stone buildings until it sounded like a hysterical mob on our heels.
Sciafani slowed as we reached the top of the stairs, gesturing to the wall of pink stone in front of us. "The Duomo," he said, beckoning me on. We turned left and walked along the south wall of the cathedral. His outburst had tempered my earlier sense of suspicion, replacing it with satisfaction at hitting my target. I still didn't understand him, but at least I knew now that there was a story behind his evasions. The emotion with which he had turned on me made that clear.
It was one of the little rules my dad had drummed into my head. When something doesn't feel right, find out why. You'd be surprised, he used to tell me, how many times people get that little gnawing sense of something wrong and ignore it. A guy says something that contradicts what he said an hour ago, and you figure, I must've heard him wrong. People want everything to fit in with what they know, and they twist the facts to make things match. The trick-he told me a couple of dozen times-is to recognize that thread of wrongness and pull at it until you unravel the truth. And to keep at it until you do.
He never told me to pray to Jesus for it.
At the west end of the cathedral we turned and went up the steps to the main door. It wasn't a fancy cathedral like the ones you see in pictures. It wasn't even as nice as the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston, with its tall stained-glass windows, bright red doors, and massive bell tower. This bell tower was short, squat, and looked like they'd stopped working on it long before my granddaddy was born. The walls were soft limestone, the blocks uneven and worn, crumbling away in places. Carvings in the stone were unrecognizable, hazy with blurred edges, like my memory. The front was plain, nothing but a single round window above the door, a cross set in the stained glass the only decoration. But from the top of the steps, you couldn't beat the view. Across and beyond the rooftops of Agrigento, to the south, acres of ancient ruins lay as they had for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years.
To the west, new ruins were being made in Porto Empedocle and all along the coast road. Smoke filled the sky, showing all the variations of battle. Furious, dark, billowing clouds from the port, maybe an oil storage depot on fire. Gray smoke from buildings, caught on the wind and drifting toward us on the breeze off the sea. Here and there a pinpoint of flame and greasy smoke as a smashed vehicle consumed fuel and flesh. Along the coast road, dust and smoke from skirmishes produced a hazy glimmer in the harsh sun. Men were dying. We turned our backs and opened the door to the Duomo.
Standing in the doorway, I saw it was lighter inside than I had expected. Wooden crossbeams painted in bright colors with scrollwork, flowers, and dancing angels gave the interior a cheery look, compared to the dark and dank church in purgatory. This looked like a place you might actually find some happiness. I put my hand in my pocket and felt the crumpled silk handkerchief, cool to the touch, and wondered whom I would end up giving it to, or if it would be taken from me. I shivered.
" Carne? " a small voice asked. I nearly jumped, spooked by my own thoughts, and saw three children standing behind us, two little girls and a boy. He was the oldest, maybe eight or nine.
" Carne? " he said again, looking to Sciafani this time.
"Doesn't that mean meat?" I said, remembering a few Italian words I'd learned from Al DeAngelo that weren't swear words.
"Yes, but they use it to mean food. They honor us by asking for meat, since only rich men could give such a gift to a beggar." He shrugged, turning from them slightly, speaking with his body what he thought of them.
" Carne? " one of the little girls asked. I wondered if she thought we were debating how much meat to give them or what kind. Beefsteak or chicken? We had eaten Italian rations last night and I still had one crumpled packet in my shirt pocket. I pulled it out, the white wrapping dirty and ripped, but the words BISCOTTI DOLCI still stood out. Sweet biscuits.
" Nessuna carne," I said. " Mi dispiace." I figured I should practice apologizing in Italian, and wondered how many languages I would learn to express sorrow in.
" Grazie," the boy said, putting his arms around the girls' shoulders and shepherding them away. The little girl who had taken the biscuits held them to her chest and looked at me over her shoulder, her dark eyes locked onto mine as her brother led her down the steps. An antiaircraft gun on the hill behind us began firing, and she flinched at the noise, but held her gaze as she disappeared down the steep steps.